December 2013

I got a Fitbit Force for an early Christmas present this year, and at first I was confused by the the fitbit.com “Switch to Activity Record” option. I figured it out, so I thought I would write about it here in case the explanation helps anyone else.

On the “Sleep” tab you can “edit” a sleep entry and see something like this:

Here Fitbit’s site is showing me that I slept 10:24pm – 6:01am.

If you click “Switch to Activity Record” near the bottom of the yellow box the sleep data disappears and the UI changes to say “Record has been moved to your Activity Tracking page. Click to view“.

What just happened? Where did my sleep go?

Clicking “Click to view” (or going to the Activities tab) and selecting the same day the sleep data was for shows:

Aha! “Switch to Activity Record” took my sleep data (from 10:24pm – 6:01am) and reinterpreted it as non-sleep data; so now the movements I made from 10:24pm-6:01am are interpreted as steps/calories/etc.

You can change this data back to being interpreted as sleep data by editing the entry and clicking “This is a sleep record”, shown here:

Maybe “Switch to Activity Record” is obvious to you, but I think it could use a better UI/description.

(I won’t get into how terrible the fitbit.com overall UI is. Okay, I will: note that “End time” is “6 : 1” instead of “6:01”, and that checkboxes and buttons and links are seemingly randomly used to change and select options, and that the time entry forms are completely different in the Activity and Sleep views, and that Some Options Are In First Letter Caps and others are not.)

On the bright side, I like the Fitbit Force device itself. It’s relatively comfortable to wear during the day and at night (normally I hate wearing watches while I sleep), and seems accurate enough, though I’ve only used it for a day so far; we’ll see how it holds up over time.

While I’m blah-blah-blah’ing here, I’ll add that I’d like to see a new feature. As it is, you press the Force’s (only) button to see the current time. I noticed that each time I want to see the time I first rotate my wrist so the Force’s display is more parallel to my face. My feature request is that the Force recognizes this sharp-ish wrist rotation and activates the display without requiring me to press the button. Maybe that’s not possible in practice with the sensors the Force has, but it might worth a try.